


Untitled Carmilla Romance

by Mymble



Category: Dr. Carmilla (Musician), Dr. Carmilla and the Void Quartet, The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Cats, F/F, Fluff, I just wrote it, Just Sweetness and Banter, Lesbian, Machiya, Nothing Scary Here, Please don't ask me where this is located in time and space, Romance, She's a cat person get it get it do you get it, Slice of Life, The Machiya Extended Universe, queer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28576932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mymble/pseuds/Mymble
Summary: Carmilla gets a job, makes some crepes, meets a girl. Or rather, a girl meets Carmilla. Lighthearted lesbian summer job romance at the market with a cameo from everyone's favourite cuddly void, Catmilla.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla/Original Unnamed Character
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Untitled Carmilla Romance

I’ll tell you about when I met her. 

It was the summer break, and I worked at a stall on the overpriced indoor market down by the river, selling, I shit you not, sunglasses for dogs. Our stall was tucked away on the mezzanine floor, attracting very little foot traffic (two or four-legged) but with a clear view of the main hall below. And there, at the crepe stand, she worked. 

Among all the activity of the market, she captivated me immediately. Her bright red hair was bobbed short, accentuating her long neck and allowing glimpses of an intricately knotted tattoo that flashed into view at the nape. One of her eyes was covered by a discrete black eye-patch. She looked completely different to everyone else, but in a way that suggested she was real and it was the rest of the world that was out of place. 

I watched her from above. When she made crepes, she wielded the wooden crepe spreader with precision. She painted the batter on the hotplate in concentric circles, sliced bananas in even coins, and carefully levered the finished crepe with her thin spatula and folded its filigreed edges into a paper cone before handing it to the customer with a nod. She seemed immune to pressure to perform customer service. As the smell of toasted nuts and chocolate drifted up to my stall, I wished that I did anything with half the verve that this stranger made crepes. 

My second week on the job, I will admit that I arrived to work badly hungover. I slumped at the stall, dry-throated, as the blurry shapes of customers lurched into one another in my peripheral vision, and the echoing clatter of the market vibrated each bone in my skull. I closed my eyes and allowed myself a moment of pure self-pity. 

When I opened them, she was looking at me with just a hint of amusement. Here was that gently waving bobbed hair I’d been admiring from above, that long neck, but now I could also see her big, serious eye and her silver lip-ring. Her red apron matched her hair, and the name-tag read: ‘Carmilla’. 

‘Dogs?’ I managed, flapping a weak hand at the merchandise, hating myself, ‘Dogs who need… sunglasses?’. It sounded even more absurd than usual, and I was suddenly worried that I was dreaming. She shook her head with a wry smile, ‘I’m more of a cat person, myself’. Her voice was a little husky, her accent cut-glass. ’Actually, I bought you a coffee. You seemed in need.’ 

She placed a travel-mug on the table and the chocolatey-bitter coffee smell filled the air between us. I may have whimpered in gratitude.  
‘I tried to keep up with the 18 year-olds’ I croaked, reaching clumsily for the mug. ‘They’re not students, they’re machines’. Carmilla nodded her understanding.  
‘Drink up’ she said, ‘It’ll help’.  
I babbled my thanks and took a sip of the coffee, which was hot, strong, and immensely comforting.  
‘I want that cup back, by the way’ said Carmilla, as she walked away from the stall. I looked at the mug’s logo — mustard yellow, circular, with characters I couldn't read. I’d have sworn I’d never seen the brand before, but somehow I still felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me. 

When I went to return the mug the next morning, Carmilla was hunched behind her hotplate speaking tersely into a flip-phone.  
‘No, I am not going to bail you out!’, she hissed, ‘For one thing, I do not have the money, for another I have a job — have you ever heard of having a job, Jonathan? And for a third… wait a minute, how did you even get this number?’ she removed the phone from her ear and looked at it with an unreadable expression as the voice on the other end jabbered urgently. She hung up without another word, noticed me and raised an eyebrow.  
‘Sorry’ I said, ‘I wasn’t meaning to eavesdrop… I just came by to… but that sounds… phew!’ I mimicked wiping sweat from my forehead and then cringed at my own awkwardness. ’It sounds a lot, I mean. Is he your ex?’  
She snorted a laugh. ‘My son’ she said, surprising me. I hadn’t clocked her as old enough to have an estranged delinquent son. I opened my mouth to say something to that effect, but she shook her head and waved a long-fingered hand as if to waft away the topic, so I changed tact and handed back her travel mug. Our fingertips touched, just for a moment. She started to heat the hotplate and it gave out a gently sweet and smoky scent.

‘Thank you so much’ I said, earnestly, ‘That coffee really helped.’ It was almost spooky how quickly it had acted on my hangover. I was starting to believe that Carmilla might be a witch, but if so she seemed to be a good one. She nodded. ‘I don’t usually share. It’s rather scarce, and I’m somewhat, ah, languid during the day without it.’ She smiled that wry half-smile “You just looked so pathetic.”

‘Sad but true’, I agreed. ‘Anyway, I made you a little something to say thanks, I rooted in the inside pocket of my bomber jacket and drew out the fuzzy shape of a felted black cat. The middle had got away from me a little, and the cat looked a tad stretched, but I hoped Carmilla wouldn’t mind.  
She stroked it between her fingers with a smile.  
‘It looks just like me’, she said.  
‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, not sure I’d heard her correctly.  
‘It looks just like mine. My cat.’ She gently propped the little figure against a tin of coffee. ‘Look, the plate’s got to temperature — you can have the first crepe for free, it might be a bit unfortunate looking but it’ll taste good’ It did. I walked to my stall with greasy fingers and the sharp and sweet mixture of lime juice and sugar on my tongue. Work wasn’t so bad that day. 

Carmilla was off the next two days, and I felt unreasonably resentful towards the dozy-looking boy with the art-school mullet who was on shift at the crepe stand. I occupied myself by checking updates on the mysterious new object that had recently appeared in the solar system. Apparently the top scientists had gathered that it was a) extremely large and b) doing fuck-all. Sandra, our stalls’ only regular customer, whose short grey hair was tipped with purple and who I had never seen in the company of a dog, assured me that the object would soon train its interstellar weapons on us and wipe sentient life off the planet. She sounded quite cheerful about the idea.

When Carmilla was off for the third day in a row, I cornered the crepe boy as he languorously packed baby spinach into a Tupperware. He had a name tag pinned to his apron with an acid house smiley sticker on it, but no name. He was watching something on his phone while he worked and a studio audience laughed in tinny cacophony.  
‘You’re the dog sunglasses girl’, he greeted me. Bloody hell, I thought, that was what I’d become. ‘Yeah, guilty as charged.’ I replied, ‘Uh, listen, do you know when Carmilla’s next on? I haven’t seen her in a few days’. 

He picked an escaped spinach leaf off the counter and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘She’s sick, I think? She said she had sunspots?’, he shrugged, then seemed to remember something, and his tone turned wheedling ‘But you’re her pal, right? she left her purse here — I was meant to take it round her house, but…’ he shrugged again, ‘You could do it?’ He smiled in a way he probably thought was charming. 

I was torn: I didn’t want to encourage this wee chancer in ditching his chores on the first woman he saw, but it *was* a perfect excuse to go and visit Carmilla. ‘Fine’ I said, accepting the wallet. ‘But I’m taking this as payment’. I snatched an overpriced bag of gourmet popcorn from the stall, and then a packet of stroopwafels for good measure. ‘You drive a hard bargain, dog specs’, he mumbled after me. I ignored him and turned the purse over in my hands. It was warm turquoise leather, worn soft, and edged in red stitching. I was glad I could return it to her. 

Carmilla lived in the basement of a once-white stucco house, in a surprisingly upscale neighbourhood not far from the market. As I got closer, however, it became clear that this house had been otherwise engaged while the rest of the street was busy gentrifying. Straggling Virginia creeper didn’t quite cover the piebald patches of brick showing through the stucco, the red paint of the front door was blistered from sun and age, and the glass in an upstairs windows seemed to have been replaced by a faded Lunar flag. It had a certain ramshackle charm, but beside its pristine neighbours, the building slouched like a rebellious teenager in a politician’s family portrait. 

On the doorstep of the basement flat sat a tall black cat, sleek and alert, watching me with steady green eyes. ‘Oh hello, beautiful!’, I greeted them, stretching out a hand for them to sniff, ‘You must be Carmilla’s. Is she in?’. The cat rubbed their cheek enthusiastically against my outstretched fingers. ‘Nao’, they said, clearly. I laughed in surprise. ‘No? I’ll just knock to make sure. Not saying I don’t believe you.’ The cat made a little ‘mrrp’ in response, jumped onto the flaking-painted windowsill and started intently washing a paw. I chapped the door, waited, tried again, and when there was still no response I scrawled a note to Carmilla, wrapped it around the purse and posted both through the creaky letterbox. ‘Guess you were right’, I said to the cat. They bopped my hand with their cold nose, and I stroked their head. 

I lingered for a companionable couple of minutes stroking the cat, who purred a deep rumble that I felt through my fingertips. This pleasant moment was interrupted by a man’s irritable-looking ruddy face looming down from the neighbouring house’s bannister. ‘Watch it’, he said loudly, ‘That one’ll have your fingers off’. At this the cat stiffened under my hand and directed a forceful hiss at the interloper, before bounding away among the flowerpots in two great leaps. ‘See’, said the man, clomping up towards the front door. ‘Evil through and through’. I kept my opinion to myself. As I left I noticed an odd symbol marker-penned on the underside of the stairs. It was made up of a slashed circle with dots on either side, enclosed in two sideways Vs. I stared at it for a moment, but couldn’t figure it out. 

The next morning I was delighted to see Carmilla back at the crepe stand, although she seemed less enthused at the prospect. ‘I’d like to see Horace make a crepe with only one eye’ she muttered ominously, as she scraped burnt cheese remnants off the hotplate. Horace? I thought, no wonder the dude didn’t fill in his name tag. I took a sip of my chain-store coffee that had only become more disappointing since tasting Carmilla’s. ‘He did seem a little…’  
‘Sloppy? Slapdash? Feckless? Slipshod?’ she offered, jabbing the air with the wire brush to punctuate the words.  
‘Something like that’, I agreed.  
‘Thank you for returning my purse, anyway’ she said, ‘I do appreciate it. I’m sorry I wasn’t… available’.  
‘Oh, no problem. I got to meet your cat — what’s their name by the way?’  
She stopped re-organising the mini-fridge for a moment. ‘Uh, Catmilla’, she answered, looking uncharacteristically embarrassed.  
I giggled. ‘You named your cat after yourself? That’s adorable’.  
‘Yes, well’, she said, primly, ‘I believe you have some dogs to sell sunglasses to.’  
‘I guess I do’, I sighed.  
‘But perhaps I could buy you dinner, later?’. She said it casually, her head still in the fridge and her hands full of miniature butter portions.  
‘Um, sure!’ I answered, surprised, ’Where… do we? When?’  
‘I’ll be at your stall when you finish — I hope you can handle spicy food’. Did she wink at me? Hard to tell in a person with one eye. Sandra didn’t talk about the mysterious space object that afternoon. I think I might have frightened her off with how much I was smiling. 

In the warm red interior of the restaurant, Carmilla and I had nearly finished our meal when the crowd arrived. On the table was one lone jemput-jemput; the flaky, end of a roti and a small pool of deep red-brown curry; a few leaves of garlic-fried pak choi. I was just spooning the last of the egg-fried rice into my mouth when I heard the ragged chanting, and saw the shapeless crowd milling on the pavement. 

‘Oh for goodness sake’ said Carmilla, furrowing her brow at the window, ’I thought they’d given up on this charade.’ She saw my confusion and waved an arm to indicate that it was all beneath her consideration. ‘Some very tiresome people have taken it upon themselves to be offended by my existence’, she explained, coolly. ‘They are a nuisance, but I don’t think a threat’. She counted out her cash and folded it neatly into the bamboo dish between us.

I squinted at one of the signs through the foggy window: ’”Lesbian… blood suckers”? Do lesbians suck blood? Should I be sucking blood?’  
She patted my arm ‘You’re doing just fine.’ She swigged the final gulp of her cider. ‘We should probably get this crowd away from the restaurant though. Bad for business.’  
As we neared the door I recognised a ruddy face among the crowd: ‘Hey, that’s your neighbour, isn’t it?’ I nudged her, ‘He was rude to Catmilla.’  
‘Yes. That’s Gary’, she said, pronouncing his name with the full weight of her contempt. ’I do apologise for the inconvenience, but are you ready to run?’  
I groaned, ‘I’m so full of curry…’  
‘Come on’ she coaxed, ‘I’ll hold your hand’. I shivered just a little as we touched. We didn’t wait for the crowd’s clumsy grasp to surround us. We ran, hands clasped, laughing and stumbling around couples and knots of drinkers leaving the pubs. The lumpy muttering shape of the group trailed behind us for a couple of minutes, and then stopped. ’Lesbian blood suckers forever!’ I shouted wildly at their retreating backs. ‘Shhh’, said Carmilla, bringing a finger to my mouth. I kissed it, and then kissed her on the lips. Seagulls cackled overhead, and red lights shimmered their reflections on the water. It was a long while before we left the dock.


End file.
